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Presenter: Dunbar Ogden
This videoconference (and book) is an important reminder of the shameful miseries and insults inflicted upon African-Americans prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This videoconference memoir is a moving father-son story told by the son of Reverend Ogden.
This videoconference (and BOOK) is a true story with an unlikely hero: an aristocratic pastor from the old-style Deep South who led the 1957 integration of Central High School in Little Rock Arkansas because his conscience drove him to do it. In close partnership with Mrs. Daisy Bates, a feisty black female newspaper editor, Reverend Ogden kept up the struggle until the first black student had graduated (Ogden smuggled the young Dr. Martin Luther King into the ceremony). By then, Ogden had become an influential national spokesman for civil rights. Along the way he had to face his own doubts and depression, financial hardships, and terrible tragedy in his own family. His reward was to be fired by his congregation and forgotten by history, but he lived to see the outcome of the great revolution he had helped start.
On September 4, 1957, the group of African American high school students who became known as the Little Rock Nine walked up to the front of Central High to enroll in school. They were turned away by the National Guard, who had been called out by Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus. “Blood will run in the streets,” said Faubus, “if Negro pupils should attempt to enter Central High School.” A mob seethed out front. The man who led the Nine up to the lines of the National Guard on that fateful morning was the author's father, a white Presbyterian pastor.
My Father Said Yes is the untold story of the Reverend Dunbar Ogden, who became the pro-integration leader in Little Rock's white community. He responded to a call for support from Daisy Bates, co-owner of the town's black newspaper. Both faced fierce opposition from within as well as from outside. Reverend Ogden lost his church and Daisy Bates lost her newspaper.
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